Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Various

vSphere Breakroom Chats benefits of containers and some challenges customers face!

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I was recently invited to join the vSphere Breakroom Chats video series and had a lot of fun with Shobith going over the various challenges customers are seeing, but of course, also discussing the benefits for customers when running these workloads on a virtualized platform. Wanted to use my blog at least to share the outcome of our discussion with all readers. Just watch it below, or go to this link and watch it on youtube directly. We discussed the following topics:

  1. Benefits of containers and why they are so entrenched in the IT industry.
  2. Challenges that enterprises are facing in scaling containers in their environment
  3. How is Kubernetes solving these issues faced by enterprises? And how VMware is helping IT admins with this?
  4. The future direction of Kubernetes and microservices technology
  5. Tips for IT professionals wanting to educate themselves on Kubernetes, containers, and microservices.

If you have a podcast by the way, or you have a youtube channel and would like me to be a guest, don’t hesitate to reach out. Always happy to join for a fun conversation!

Top 15 VMware Explore Sessions to attend!

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Every year over the past decade or so I have done this “Top 15/20 VMworld Sessions to attend” post, although VMworld no longer exists and VMware created this new event called VMware Explore, I feel that this tradition does need to live on! I went over the full catalog and picked the 15 sessions I feel are “must-watch” content. Now, to be clear, this is my opinion and you may not agree, and that is fine! If you feel a session is missing, just drop a note in the comment section so people can see what else they should consider watching/attending!

Before we start the list, I do want to mention that Frank Denneman, William Lam, and I will be part of a panel session hosted by Pete Flecha and John Nichsolson, aka the Virtually Speaking Podcast crew. The Title of the session is: “60 Minutes of Virtually Speaking Live: Accelerating Cloud Transformation [MCLB2804US]“. Make sure to register as soon as you can, as I am sure that this one will fill up fast!

Here we go, please note that this is a mix of “live/in-person” and “on-demand” sessions, and the sessions are in no particular order!

  • Project Monterey Behind the Scenes: A Technical Deep Dive [CEIB1576US] by Dave Morera and Meghana Badrinath (In-Person)
  • Deconstructing vSAN – A Deep Dive into the Internals of vSAN [INDB2406USD] by Pete Koehler and John Nicholson (On-Demand)
  • Get to Know the Next-Generation of vSAN Architecture [CEIB2172US] by Rakesh Radhakrishnan and Wenguang Wang (In-Person)
  • Core Storage Best Practice Deep Dive [CEIB1382USD] by Cody Hosterman and Jason Massae (On-Demand)
  • How Your Future Server Purchase Should Be Ready for Tiered Memory [VIB1390US] by Richard Brunner (In-Person)
  • Project Capitola – Vision for a Disaggregated Memory World – Addressing Capacity and Cost Challenges for Business-Critical Applications [CEIB1268USD] by Sudhir Balasubramanian, Sridhar Kayathi, Arvind Jagannath (On-Demand)
  • A Technical Deep Dive into Container Security [SECB2366USD] by Haim Helman and Stephane List (On-Demand)
  • VMware Edge Compute Stack Reference Architecture Deep Dive [CEIB2325US] by Ken Guo and Michael Wright (In-Person)
  • Architecting Multi-Cloud Horizon [EUSB2088USD] by Hilko Lantinga and Richard Terlep (On-Demand)
  • Designing a Secure Multi-Cloud Infrastructure with VMware and Google [SECB2398US] by Wade Holmes and Chris McCain (In-Person)
  • Tanzu Application Platform – A Deeper Dive for Developers [CNAB2045USD] by Ben Wilcock and Alex Barbato (On-Demand)
  • Advanced Networking and Security for VMware Cloud on AWS [NETB2287US] by Sandeep Sharma and Jeremy Anderson (In-Person)
  • Tanzu Platform for Kubernetes and the Multi-Cloud Journey [KUBB1940US] by Kendrick Coleman, Scott Rosenberg, Katarina Brookfield (In-Person)
  • Technical Architecture and Advantages of VMware Cloud for Your Workloads [CEIB1429USD] by Niels Hagoort and Oleg Ulyanov (On-Demand)
  • Vision for Data Protection as a Service and What’s New in VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery [CEIB1236US] by Nabil Quadri and Yoomi Yong (In-Person)

Unexplored Territory #014 – Using ML accelerators efficiently with Justin Murray

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This was one fun episode. I just love talking to people about things that are relatively new to me, and AI/ML definitely is a relatively new topic for me. Justin Murray is VMware’s Tech Marketing guru on this topic and he had some great knowledge to share with us. On top of that, Justin just has a great way of simplifying/explaining things and always is a pleasure to see present/listen to. Either listen via the embedded player below or listen via Spotify: spoti.fi/3vtxjA6, Apple: apple.co/3ErCdSC, or anywhere else you get your podcasts!

Unexplored Territory #005: AI Enterprise, DPUs, and NVIDIA Launchpad with Luke Wignall

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Episode 005 is out! This time we talk to Luke Wignall, who is the Director of Technical Product Marketing at NVIDIA. We talk about some of the announcements made during the NVIDIA GTC Conference. Luke discusses NVIDIA Launchpad, AI Enterprise, and of course, we touch on DPUs aka SmartNICs. A great conversation with A LOT of information to digest. Enjoy the episode, and if you haven’t done so yet, make sure to subscribe! You can also listen via your podcast apps of course for Apple: https://apple.co/3lYZGCF, Google: https://bit.ly/3oQVarH, Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3INgN3R.

Unexplored Territory #004: vVols with Cody Hosterman!

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Episode 004 is out! This time we talk to Cody Hosterman, Director of Product Management at Pure Storage, about Virtual Volumes aka vVols! Cody shares with us the past, present, and future of vVols. I especially enjoyed his explanations around the benefits of vVols for traditional and cloud-native workload. It is also great to hear that VMware is working with Pure Storage on designing and developing a stretched cluster capability for vVols based environments. Listen below, or via Apple, Google, Spotify etc.